The present invention relates to power saving for radio communication systems.
Periodic interruption of power supplies to the major power consumptive units of repeater and terminal stations of a radio communication system such as TDMA (time-division multiple access) radio concentrator systems, is a scheme known as power saving. Power saving of this type is essential to the operation of radio communication stations located at remote, thinly populated areas or emergency radio communication stations which rely on storage batteries. As shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,577,315 issued to S. Otsuka, a power saving signal is constantly transmitted at periodic intervals from a base station and relayed by repeater stations to remote, terminal stations to cut off their power consumptive components for a preset time interval. However, origination of a call requires transmission of a long packet of data from terminal stations during an active interval of the system to request the base station to issue a series of signals according to protocols. In the disclosed prior art system, the transmission of a call origination request signal results in the disablement of power saving in the repeater and terminal stations to permit them to process the signals. Because of the lengthy packet in relation to the limited time interval during which transmission must be complete, call origination attempts from terminal stations tend to concentrate during the limited time interval and encouter data collision. When the transmitted data is destroyed by partial data overlap, the base station would generate a series of protocols, resulting in fruitless data exchanges along the network causing a systemwide traffic congestion.